How to Evaluate a Company's Crisis Communications Response

When you see a company or founder making what looks like a PR error in a moment of crisis, take a step back and consider the choice they are making in these contexts:

Are they getting advice? Is the advice good or bad? Are they following it?

Using that rubric, here's how I'd assess the Carta situation, in order of likelihood.

1. Not getting advice. It's unfortunate, but not uncommon, for CEOs at companies of all stages to isolate themselves from marketing and comms professionals when something bad happens. I've seen it among first-time founders as well as at more mature companies. Typically this happens because of lack of experience in handling a PR crisis (they don't know what they don't know); a bad experience working with a PR person in a previous crisis; a mixture of embarrassment and shame; or simply a belief that they know what they're doing better than anyone else and don't need advice. This last point plays into the classic founder-as-hero paradigm I talked about in my last post.

2. Getting good advice, but not following it. It's likely that there is at least one marketing or communications professional in the inner circle of a leadership team, internally or externally via an agency partner. For early stage venture-backed companies, that person might work for the VC, on or adjacent to its platform team. (VCs that don't invest in this type of support are sending a reinforcing signal to founders that PR doesn't matter, a topic for another day.) There are likely also other folks on the company's management team, or board, that have been through a crisis and can offer wisdom from lived experience, or at least reinforce the need for help. Yet sometimes a CEO chooses to ignore, or reject, counsel and "trust their gut."

3. Getting bad advice, and following it. Bad PR advice comes in many flavors. Sometimes the worst advice is to say nothing at all. (I've had several conversations with early stage companies that experienced crises in 2023, quickly hired very expensive crisis PR firms, and were advised by said firms to remain completely silent. Great agency business model, that.) Other times, the advice could be to lean in to an existing PR strategy that doesn't, or no longer, works. For example, I can imagine advice that encourages a founder to "just be yourself," when that self is someone who is brash, prickly, and confrontational. You don't have to check your authentic self at the door to handle a crisis, but I guarantee that emphasizing these attributes of your founder persona will not help you resolve it.

You'll note that I've left out getting good advice and following it along with getting bad advice and not following it. I don't believe these to be representative of what's happening now with Carta, but I'm placing the options on the table to remind ourselves that they are possibilities (and that they are part of the overall rubric you can use to evaluate a company's PR decisions).

Final note. If you are, or have ever been, the marketing or comms person whose advice has been ignored in a situation like this, I feel for you. I've been there, and it's not fun. But you should also know that there are plenty of leaders who do appreciate our expertise, and I hope you find one to work with. Stay strong.